How to Use News Hooks to Write Compelling Press Releases

So you’ve read through the list of Publiqly’s Most Powerful News Hooks and identified a powerful hook for your next announcement. Now what? In this article we show you how to use your News Hook(s) to create a newsworthy and compelling press release.

Why Do We Use News Hooks?Your News Hook is possibly the most important element within your press release. It helps focus your writing and highlights the real news of your announcement, so it’s more likely to catch a journalist’s or influencer’s eye.

How to Apply News Hooks (and Where)?
To make your press release stand out, you should try to make the real news rise to the top, figuratively and literally. That means that, if possible, you should introduce your News Hook in the headline of your announcement.

The most logical place is the tail end of the headline, where our workflows ask you to add color using your Narrative building blocks from your Questionnaire. But that’s not always the best place. When you picked the What’s Your Superlative hook, it usually works best to just report the news and weave your News Hook through your headline. In the example below, the News Hook (being the first) is highlighted in blue:

ABC Launches World’s First Gluten-Free Croissants With Old World Taste

Apart from the headline, the News Hook also weaves its way through the rest your announcement. If you have introduced a hook in your headline, you will have to back it up throughout your release. For example, if your headline mentions a trend that your news is playing into, you will have to support that narrative in the rest of your release by providing statistics, background and quotes. You want readers to believe that what you are saying is true and it should be evident why your news is relevant to them.

You can also combine more than one hook, or use one hook higher up and one lower down. For example with a celebrity endorsing an ocean cleanup project, you could lead it using the Names Make Newshook and then in the third and fourth paragraphs, you could add the Human Interesthook explaining why this topic matters so much to this person. In this example, the actress fell in love with the ocean when starring in the (fictitious) Hollywood film “Shark Woman”. Combining more than one News Hook will make your press release stronger. But don’t use too many, otherwise your story will lose focus.

To get the most out of Publiqly, be sure to also take a look at our full Resource Library here for more tips and tricks.